It’s not often we meet before school at 7 AM. But today was one of those days…

Dr. Geyer and I met with a number of teacher leaders from across the division about needs for digital content connected with the next phases of our one-to-one program. It was a great opportunity for dialog and I appreciate each teacher’s time this morning. We detailed our plans this week to distribute iPads to some of our 1:1 teachers at RES, BES, and GMS; we talked about the use of a learning management system to deliver content to students, and a commitment this summer to begin building a student-facing curriculum. Mr. Joe Beasley and Ms. Krystle Demas shared some of their experiences from GES this year with their iPad pilot in grade 4.

Writing, as a pursuit, can be a private pursuit. Writing on a blog is not private, it’s public, but the funny thing is, you may not always feel you have an audience. One person could read your blog post, or 100s, and you don’t really get a reaction unless you have comments turned on and people have something to respond to. Writers also have more established forms of public sharing, through books, magazines, the newspaper, etc. Finally, a lot of writing that takes place in schools is not public nor private, it’s what we might call semi-public. Your teacher and maybe a peer would read your work. Often that writing is to a certain specification, to ensure you are practicing the craft of writing towards improvement.

So, it’s not often that we get to write in school. Illustrate our writing. And, have a guaranteed audience that we know will read our work and give us immediate feedback. But 4th graders at Goochland Elementary recently had this opportunity through a collaborative effort of ITRT Zoe Parrish and classroom teacher Krystle Demas. Demas’ students had the opportunity in class to help Ms. Parrish define what an ebook was, then they were told they would be writing their own! And then they’d have the opportunity to share their ebooks on their iPads with preschool students next door.

The books were created with an app we installed as part of our 1:1 pilot called Book Creator, which allows students to create ePub “books” with multiple pages, text, images, and you can even insert video and audio. Students added sound files to each page so that preschool students could be “read to” when the students no longer were there. Ms. Parrish has since loaded the eBook collection on the iPads used at GES specialty center so that the preschool students can continue to enjoy the books created for them by Ms. Demas’ fourth grade students.

The books can be read on a variety of platforms. On the Macintosh, you can use iBooks in OS X Mavericks, and on iOS, you can use iBooks. Access all the books and materials used to deliver the lesson here. Kudos to Ms. Parrish and each and every one of Ms. Demas’ students for their problem solving and application of very creative skills! From what I hear, the preschool students enjoyed the experience immensely.

When poking around iTunes U and iTunes U K-12, I have found some interesting content. It may have been a college lecture, a video, and even a few PDFs. But my lens of interest is different than that of a classroom teacher, who is likely either looking for personal professional development materials (hey, it’s possible) or resources for use with kids. (If my writing bores you, scroll down to the end for some gems I found.)

The iTunes/iOS ecosystem allows you to point to passive digital content (movies, PDFs, eBooks, audio files) and interactive digital content (iBook textbooks, apps). It’s history started as iTunes U, where the emphasis was on “University.” Big names like the University of California at Berkeley signed on and used the platform as a means to share lectures and digital content. Apple even sold a complete solution to capture, edit, and publish this content. Students who came to college armed with iTunes accounts and iPods were set to grab digital content from the class they just took, or maybe even capture a lecture they missed.

The migration to K-12 content was slow and today when visiting the iTunes Store, iTunes U > K12, we’re provided a list of links to school districts and individual schools who have signed-on to share content. I browsed today with my teacher’s hat on, looking for digital content resources we might use as we expand our 1:1 program. I was flummoxed by the process and wouldn’t blame teachers for not using the site in the way I thought they might.

Content is not indexed with any sort of folksonomy save for the star rating. I cannot search, for as far as I see, for 5-star content, for example.

Browsing is pretty much limited to the collections Apple is promoting on the front page of the “store.” This construct works well for selling new music releases, but it is not efficient or effective at finding specific content such as “high school Spanish 2″ lesson ideas, or video podcasts.

Good collections of content are there, but they’ve been constructed by humans with an interest at making finding content easy for end-users such as teachers. One such example is Michigan’s MI Learning page. Virginia, for instance, has long had a page curated by the Virginia Department of Education. But the quality of content, even when you find a well-curated page, can be sketchy.

How can I borrow content across different sources to make my own course? It’s not immediately apparent, although I see others have created courses. Sharing among different content providers isn’t easily supported.

How do I get my own content online? There are a couple of methods, one of which is very technical, involving publishing with RSS feeds, in a separate web space, with a UI that is often not easy to understand and lacks the typical Apple polish or “magic.”

I can add apps to courses, but then that means kids have to pay for them. Yes, unless you’ve prepaid and pre-installed them. I wish Apple had a subscription plan that allowed unlimited access to apps rather than a purchase model. That way, teachers could self-assign apps to students and when payment stopped, the apps would ghost away. Installing apps is many times not a teacher task, but an IT task.

In the course construct, how do I use the technology to interact with my students? There is currently no interactive elements to the course, save for the app which allows students to take notes.

First, I’m not suggesting that we don’t use the resource. After all, I know there are some quality resources to be found. They simply aren’t easy to find. They are also not easy to manipulate.

I have a few recommendations if Apple wants this resource to be helpful to students and teachers in the K-12 space:

Getting content into the space needs to be easier. I know the directory model that debuted with podcasting is still in place and works, but it’s not accessible to so many educators.

Contributed content needs to come with a Creative Commons license. When you contribute content, it’s there for others to use.

All content needs to be tagged with information such as subject area, grade level, level of rigor, modality (listen, watch, read), and maybe even some standards. This information should then be baked into a search feature that’s more robust than a single search bar that looks for game apps, music videos, and hit movies.

All content should be easily dragged or dropped into a course construction. I should also be able to do the same using my own learning management system, not just Apple’s.

The browsing experience needs to be better. I love the big bold colorful boxes Apple presents like “App Toolkit for Teachers.” But clicking those links shouldn’t just provide access to content that’s been curated recently into a collection. As a science teacher, it should be my landing page to always look for fresh content.

Apps. I am not sure they’d ever consider the subscription model I mentioned above. But trying to spend $x of dollars on apps as an instructional technologist (and not a teacher) on content is tedious and frustrating. Teachers are in the best position to choose apps. But they can’t experiment without first spending a lot of money to see what’s out there. They can read reviews, but so many reviews on the store are either not educator-created and online blogs and review portals are fly-by night by well-intentioned teachers but many run out of steam. They also often don’t have the perspective of say an app review in a magazine like Macworld, by naming the “best” app for this or that.

Interactivity. The apps Apple has continually update for iOS to “talk” to iTunes such as iTunes U and Podcasts are not bad. They have polish and they work. However, Apple’s not seriously gotten into the learning management business aside for a new container model for content (e.g. courses). I am not sure from a business standpoint, however, they should. There are other experts already doing this, and I’ve attended too many ADE workshops at places like ISTE to know they aren’t content with just iTunes U courses. They’re using Moodle, Schoology, Haiku, and Edmodo with their iPads, Macs, and iPhones. If I were Apple, I’d maybe start over, and make the iPad the most compelling education purchase for a school by bundling a school’s purchase with free access to a first-class LMS. iTunes K-12 would migrate to that web-based system that had tight integration with a first-class app. An iTunes account for students wouldn’t be required (but optional), and instead, a school could choose from different account models (directory sync, Google accounts, etc.) People who are looking at the competition might just say “Wow, if I buy Apple, I’d get this top-tier learning system that no one else gets access to.”

I only mention this not because what exists now is awful, or the only solution. We use Apple tools in conjunction with a lot of other services and sources for content. But I see an opportunity for Apple to solve a problem so many educators are facing now, with the panache and magic that few other companies seem to consistently able to provide. Content in the form of apps, media files (books, video, audio, text) needs to be corralled into an easy to manage and search system of digital assets. These assets then need to be delivered to students. That’s the basic gist. I could go into more detail about how I would do that, but I don’t currently have the time nor desire to publish that at this point.

Now, iTunes U is a sharing space, but it’s one that I personally find difficult to approach with significant depth. I’m challenged on how to get my teachers to share in this space with the technical requirements for publishing. I believe the lack of quality content in the K-10 space is directly correlated with this technical hurdle. In conclusion, I hope my criticism illustrates that a system designed for selling music or loading podcast episodes on an MP3 player isn’t best equipped to help teachers deliver quality instruction with digital resources. We have a vision for what they might be like, and waiting for it is tedious when we already have great technology hardware in our hands.

All that said, I did find some content that may be of interest to our teachers.

As we look at replacing textbooks with digital content, we need a place to park it (sometimes called a learning management system), a medium to access it (say, an iPad), and lessons that describe instructional experiences to use these resources for learning.

One source where we can find a lot of freely available content is iTunes U. That said, it takes some clicking and browsing to find the gems. I found a few worth checking out.

The Brain Channel These videos are appropriate for high school students interested in learning more about topics related to neuroscience, medicine, and understanding current research related to the brain.

Over the weekend I encountered two infographics on Twitter that related to a conversation I had with Mrs. Cantor on Friday about some of the theoretical models we’re looking at to help us with our one-to-one rollout, including SAMR, TPACK, LoTI, HEAT, yadda, yadda, and yadda. On their own these models (on technology integration, twenty-first century learning, engaged instruction, etc.) might look good and make sense. However in a larger context, a real-world one, they do not necessarily play well together. Central in our discussion was the role of engagement, which is, be definition, a big concept. You’ve no doubt heard from a lot of us that we want engaged students in our schools. Dr. Geyer has shared with me that this is a two-part construct: it’s developed through our relationships with students and also the design of instruction to be actually, engaging.

One of the best-known names in the field of student engagement is Phillip Schlechty. Both Dr. Gretz and Dr. Geyer and I have consulted his work before, for instance, when developing the walk-through look-fors for student engagement. But I like even more Schlechty’s distinctions of 5 levels of student engagement.

This infographic by Dr. Rios is more comprehensive, and goes further to distinguish what an “engaged classroom” might look like, with a mixture of students at different engagement levels. I like that and know that is realistic. Anytime we attempt to think about “taking a temperature reading” for engagement, it’s one moment in time, and is a result not only of the content of a lesson, the relationship teachers have with students, but also the well-being of a student, their emotional state, and their level of anxiety (or interest in) the current activity. Furthermore, we cannot be fooled that engagement is a behavioral construct alone. To really try and measure engagement might be a foolhardy pursuit, when it is, at heart, a metacognitive state. I do think we can work with students to be mindful of being engaged, to recognize what it’s like when you’re engaged, and try and maximize the opportunities to foster engagement. We can do a lot to develop positive relationships with learners and designing instruction, for me, is all about personalization. I’ll save that for a future post.

But I did like the labels and created the above graphic to make these distinctions more clear. How might we describe the engagement levels of some of our students? Are they interested? Committed? Where is their attention?

I participated yesterday in a discussion about learning preferences–specifically in relation to professional development. There were a lot of assumptions made about how professionals want to learn, from “just tell me what you want to do” to “game changing, thought-provoking” open discussions. Specifically, we spoke about people’s preferences about how they want to interact while in a room with peers. Some of us like to sit and hear about a new idea, or how to accomplish a task (like use software). And others want to be “doing” something, whether the doing is “building,” “debating,” discussing, or even “drawing.”

I walked away from the discussion thoughtful, because while I recognize there likely is a range in learning preference, in our field of education, the method of delivery can be learning itself, no matter the content.

I have been to a lot of conferences. Last year I went to a conference where I didn’t present, and I think, it was the first time ever. I was miserable, as I figured I would be. My primary motivation for going to conferences is to present, and also to hear first-rate speakers. Over the years, however, my own preference for sitting back and listening to an amazing speaker has been challenged with sessions where I have been asked to not passively sit, but to stand up, or sit around a table, and contribute. Some of these sessions have been frustrating, but others have been really cool. The coolest ones have been those that went beyond “share with your neighbor” types of 2-minute conversations to something where all of a sudden we’re challenged to build something… together. There’s no time for norming or getting to know folks formally… it’s dive in with your sleeves rolled up.

My intellectual side will likely always favor constructionist learning. It’s a theory that’s very important to me. It means we don’t learn best by sitting passively, however efficient that may be. It means we’re active. It means we’re applying what we already know to create something new–either alone or with others.

These are my ideas, based on what I have read and have experienced with this format:

We assume many participants are leaders.

Participants are open to sharing their ideas and accepting challenges to those ideas.

You are responsible for growing with the experience.

Creativity will be celebrated in the sessions.

It only works if you’re engaged.

So, with likely dozens of ways to lead professional development, it got me thinking if each and everyone holds professionals accountable for learning. Is any expectation for responsibility for learning in a session where you’re talked at the same as for a session where you’re exploring a solution for something you’re really, really interested in? I think the “principal” or the “trainer” role in our field would say yes, we want learners, no matter if they’re teachers or students, to walk away from a training session better informed. If I go to a basket weaving session, I hope when I leave it (however long it takes to weave baskets) that if I can’t yet weave an entire basket myself, I will at least have a deeper appreciation for how one weave’s baskets, or have an appreciation for what it takes to make good baskets. If I’m irresponsible, I’ll sit in the back and read a magazine while others get their materials and give it a try.

I think more often than not, in school classrooms we test this “responsibility for learning” thing at test or quiz time. And instead it should start one day 1.

I do think all learners have a responsibility for their learning, but that cannot obfuscate our responsibility as teachers (or professional developers) to design engaging instruction opportunities that reaches participants on multiple levels: intellectually, emotionally, and creatively.

So, let me land the plane. Let’s take basket weaving as my example. Pick your preference for learning about basket weaving. There are no wrong answers.

I’ll sit in a chair for 1 hour, listening to an engaging veteran in the art of weaving baskets, who will maintain my interest through her savvy use of slideware (PowerPoint) and her special gift for story telling.

I’ll sit in a chair for 1 hour, watching someone build a the base of a basket using tools of the trade. If I am interested in this after the hour, I can go to a store and buy the materials and maybe try it out at home.

I can join others around a round table for an hour, each of us with different experience levels at building baskets (I’m a newbie!), and hear multiple perspectives on how to go about the art and craft of basket weaving. Some participants will have brought pictures of their finished products, and some, surprise, surprise, carry small projects in their oversized purses and backpacks.

Small groups are formed with chairs, and in the center of the circles made by chairs, are basket waving materials. Together in small groups we are instructed to build our own baskets. Four experts circulate the room helping the novices, while groups naturally are peppered with participants with previous experience. While we were given an hour for the session, we’re welcome to extend the session by eating lunch in the same space.

I peeked in a room with a “basket weaving” sign on the door, just to see what crazies might come to that session. Instead of going in, I entered the room adjacent, where there’d be a “fair share” of great project-based lessons teachers had delivered.

No matter which number you picked, consider how:

engaging one session might be versus another,

how much your own passion or interest in the subject plays into that engagement,

the type of preparation and expertise required to lead one session versus another,

your students might think about their next lesson on something they may initially know nothing about, or have any interest in (say, like basket weaving), and what they payoff is at the end of the year, or the end of their career: was basket weaving the important thing to learn? or was it the skills they developed through the learning process? And if you pick skills, which ones will those be? Sitting and absorbing? Storytelling? Problem solving with others in a group? Seeing how their own application of a solution to a problem (in this case project lesson design) could be improved by the experience or expertise of another)?

While importing some video I have to edit from our recent forum/panel on social media, I had the time to finally crack-open a book on inquiry-based learning. Halbert and Kaser’s book looks excellent–and I couldn’t wait to share what I discovered on page 22 about providing students effective feedback.

They quote from the work of John Hattie, who in his 2009 book Visible Learning, says:

When teachers seek, or at least are open to feedback from students as to what students know, what they understand, where they make errors, when they have misconceptions, when they are not engaged–then teaching and learning can be synchronized and powerful. Feedback to teachers helps make learning visible.

Some recommendations and food for thought:

Don’t provide extensive feedback, then assign a grade;

Feedback shouldn’t cause an emotional reaction; it should result in more thinking;

When feedback works it is more work for the recipient than for the donor;

The timing is important; shouldn’t be too early or too late;

Students (and teachers!) need a safe environment for learning where they can make and learn from errors;

Effective feedback needs to direct attention more to what’s next rather than how a student did on a single piece of work.

Moreover–feedback does not have to be extensive. It can be formal, like comments on a written paper, but it can also be a quick, supportive spoken sentence to a student on the way out the door. Our job is first provide feedback and then to focus on how we can make feedback valuable to students.

At this week’s board meeting, we presented some details about our 1:1 expansion next year for grades 5 and 6 across the division. Included in this presentation was some of the numbers involved in all the new devices we will be supporting!

We’re offering training on June 16, June 18, and June 19th for new teachers participating in the 1:1 program. We’re excited about expanding the program.

I also passed out books at our leadership meeting for our principals. We’ll be reading them between now and the summer and have a book discussion at one of our retreat days.

Dr. Mark Edwards, currently the superintendent in Mooresville, NC, and formerly the superintendent in Henrico, has some advice about how and why to start a 1:1 program. As I shared with all of our principals, this isn’t really about new technology or more computers. It’s about improving instruction through engaged student participation in and outside the classroom, through opportunities to personalize instruction, and through teaching that begins to includes inquiry into daily instruction.

Our 1:1 program is being planned to expand slowly, year by year, over a 4-year period. By year four, we plan to have gone completely 1:1 in grades 3-12, across the division.

We will have collected all of the iPads from GES students by June 4, 2014. We plan to re-deploy in Fall, 2014 to grades 3-5 at GES and grades 5 at BES and RES, plus grade 6 at GMS. We will be advertising deployment night times this summer to parents, when families come to learn more about the program, receive training, and take delivery of iPads.

This week we hosted the Region 1 Virginia School Board Association meeting. In attendance were school board members from across the region, superintendents, and school board clerks. Among the highlights of the evening was a dinner catered by the Goochland High School culinary arts students with Ms. Yurick, an art contest with Goochland winning in a category, and a performance from our jazz band.

What really stood out for me was all the teamwork that took place to make the night a success. I think our guests saw optimism in the eyes of our staff and students. They also got to see (and taste!) excellence. And the core value of creativity was on display too.

Mr. Newman, Mr. Watson, Mr. Turner, Mr. Martin, and Mr. Givens, Mr. Greenway, Ms. Yurick, and Mr. Bouwens all had integral parts in making the night a success. Mrs. Hardy, one of our board members, wrote to tell us how proud she was of our school division after the event. I have to agree!

The presentation Dr. Geyer and I gave was well-received. It was exciting to entertain others with the positive direction we’ve taken here in Goochland.

About this blog…

This is the blog of John Hendron, Ed.D., director of innovation & strategy for Goochland County Public Schools. Through this blog I share information for teachers, administrators and families dealing with learning and teaching with technology.